I recently had a question from a seller in a neighborhood with a lot of foreclosures on how to help improve the situation. I thought would share the response with you:

Communities that have high involvement of neighbors tend to have a slightly lower rate of foreclosure.  Get organized and get involved with the HOA.  You can get the word out that there are other options.

CNN recently stated that every foreclosures is 1% hit on your property’s value.  So you have incentive to help out.

You can direct them to good connected Realtors who might refer them to loan modification programs, or short sales (which hurt everyone but not as bad as a vacant foreclosures).

Some things are inevitable, but keeping up your home and helping others is a great way to build your community.

You can search for all the foreclosures in Georgia at my website.

With Rates in the low 5% and mid 4’s% (for some), buyers are back in a big way.  Great Deals used to sell in 2 weeks or less are going the moment they are listed.  Good Deals are now moving much quicker and homes are getting showings.

So Christmas will be coming THIS year as more people find homes and sellers start to see more offers… at least my clients.

Before you get too excited about a small shift in the market place, it’s still a great time to be buyer and it’s still a buyer’s market (but for how long) but it’s also a great time as a seller to put your home on the market because:

• Interest Rates are super low (making your home more affordable)
• There is less foreclosure inventory on the market (Equals Less Inventory)
• Banks are more reluctant to do short sales since they might be able to do a modified loan to keep the person in the home (Equals Less Inventory)
• Builders are not building at all anymore but the ones that have home standing are selling at highly reduced rates (less inventory)
• Now is a great time to MOVE UP! (if you lose 3% on $100,000 that is $3,000, if the next seller loses 3% on $300,000 that is $9,000 making it a $6,000 gain)

Why it’s great to use the Jarvis Team at Keller Williams!

1. Winner of the 2008 Consumer Choice Award
2. Winner of the JD Power Award for Consumer Satisfaction
3. Number 1 Office in Gwinnett County. Our market share continues to grow while other’s decline.
4. We can put your home on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

With the current market conditions it’s likely that if your home has been on the market, you might have had a price reduction.  What’s interesting is where you end up.  Look at the prices, are you Wal-mart priced?

What’s Wal-Mart pricing?  We all know that the tried and true method to get us to buy something is to price it at what the seller wants, say $5 then knock a penny off, to $4.99.  Our mind says, “Aha, $4!” when we just paid $5 for the item.

Well some agents and home owners have the funny misconception that Wal-mart pricing is the way to go with homes.  The fact is that Walmart pricing absolutely works for home buyers too.  It works, against you because of one key difference…

AT WALMART, YOU DON’T NEGOTIATE.

So buyers see your price at $399,900 and they think, “Great it’s $399K.”  At a bare minimum, you’ll be getting an offer less $900.00.

It actually goes much further then that.  This is not simply some idea that I’ve come up with (although I would not fault you if you thought that).  No, this concept has actually been backed up by Cornell University.

Using data from 27,000 real estate transactions in two U.S. markets, they found that buyers paid higher prices when asking prices were more exact [like rounded numbers].

People learn to associate precision with smaller magnitudes, wrote the resarch team led by Manoj Thomas. 

Furthermore, with this new generation of home buyers using the internet, it makes absolutely no sense to ever list your home at a price that does not take advantage of this. 

A home priced at $324,900 will only appear for hom buyers searching $325K and down.  However, if the home were correctly priced at $325K, home buyers from $350K (in a search from $350 to $325K) and under would see this home.  The reason for this is that most internet search engines use 10’s and 25’s, not 99’s. 

So next time you get ready to put your home on the Atlanta Real Estate market, be sure not to price it like good ole’ Sam Walton would.